Nemesis Software

The following information was correct as of 1996, however as of February 2013 it's unclear whether it's still available.

It is primarily a Go-playing program, but has a number of features
which add to its value for Go teaching. Installation is easy.

This review describes four software products:
Nemesis Go Master,
Nemesis Go Master Deluxe
(a superior version of Nemesis Go Master, with extra features),
Nemesis News, and
Test Your Go Strength.
They were written by Bruce Wilcox,
but he is no longer associated with them. They are now supplied
by Nemesis Enterprises, a company controlled by his ex-wife, Leslie
Bianchi.

This (and Go Master Deluxe) has separate versions for Dos,
Macintosh, and Windows. I have tested only the Windows version,
but I have no reason to think that the other versions are much
different.

It is primarily a Go-playing program, but has a number of features
which add to its value for Go teaching. Installation is easy.

It has options of 19-by-19, 13-by-13, and 9-by-9 boards; all
four combinations of human and program playing Black and White;
up to nine handicap stones; three skill levels; and "wisdom"
- the random generation of irrelevant remarks. It can record
partly-played games for re-loading later, but it does this in
a format of its own, incompatible with other Go programs. It
uses Japanese scoring and handicap stone placements.

I found is easy to beat. It is very optimistic about the status
of its groups, which means that you can carry on attacking its
groups after they are dead, building up strength for your next
attack, while it makes "defensive" moves inside the
dead groups. Once it knows it has lost, it offers to resign.
If you play on to the end of the game, it calculates the score.
When I did this, it calculated correctly; but if it mis-judges
the status of a group, you can alter the group's status manually,
and ask it to count again.

Perhaps more valuable than its playing strength are the evaluations
of the position which you can ask it to make. There are seven
of these. It will show the number of liberties of each string
of stones; who controls, as territory or as influence, each area
of the board; the score; any "shape" moves that are
available; the "aliveness" of each group, on a scale
from 0 to 10, with the sector lines that enclose them; what it
thinks are good moves, with its explanations of what they might
achieve; and which strings of stones it thinks can be killed.

It is a fairly old program, and therefore plays fast on a modern
PC. It has a clock which it uses to show the time used by each
side. On my 66MHz 486, it completed a game using less then five
minutes of its time.

This is the same program as Nemesis Go Master, with three extra
features: Tactical Wizard, Joseki Genius and Scribbler. Any of
these can be used during the course of a game, as well as for
positions which you set up.

Tactical Wizard investigates the life-and-death status of the
group that you specify. It shows the sequence which establishes
this status. It is fast, but not particularly reliable. It does
not distinguish between "alive because it is your move and
you can play here" and "alive even if you pass".
This is unfortunate, because the difference between "unsettled"
and "unconditionally alive" is one which needs to be
emphasised to players who might benefit from this feature.

Joseki Genius is the feature of Nemesis which I find much the
most useful. You ask it to show the joseki continuation in a
specified corner; and (unless the position is already outside
its joseki book) it shows all the possible next moves. You can
then step back and forth through the various lines of the joseki.
It seems to know a very large number of lines: if a 3-4 stone
is approached on the 5-3 point, it knows of nine continuations,
one of them on the 8-8 point. It even knows six follow-ups to
this surprising move. But unlike Many Faces of Go, it does not
know how to answer the non-joseki moves which tempt kyu-players.

Scribbler is a tool for producing annotated Go diagrams. You
can add extra stones, put smily and sad faces on stones, add lettering,
draw points, lines and arrows on the board, and shade areas of
it. You can select any rectangular region of the board as your
diagram. You can output the result to your printer (I was testing
the Windows version, and it used the printer-driver installed
by Windows), or create a PostScript output file.

This is a data disk, and needs Nemesis Go Master (either version)
to run it. There is only one version, which is suitable for dos,
Windows and Macintosh. It is misleadingly titled: it has nothing
to do with news, but is a computer version of Bruce Wilcox's book
"Instant Go Volume 1". That book (which is not
volume 1 of anything; "Volume 1" is part of
its title) is also available from Nemesis Enterprises.

The book and the "News" disk both teach various
principles of Go that are rather different from those usually
taught. In particular they explain Wilcox's idea of "sector
lines", which many players have found instructive. The book
and disk complement each other, explaining the same things but
using different examples.

This is also a data disk which needs Nemesis Go Master (either
version) to run it. It is a selection of fifty problems. In
each problem, you are given a position to study, and when you
think you have found the best move, you click on that point. If
you get the right answer, it explains why the move is good. If
you get it wrong, but choose what it thinks is a plausible guess,
it explains what is wrong with it, and shows you the selection
of other moves which you might try. If you make an implausible
guess, it helps you by showing you what it thinks are plausible
moves.

The evaluations of the moves are full and clear, in both
respects better than most problem books. The handling of the wrong
answers is much fuller than is usual in problem books. Sequences of play are
given that follow from the various moves, and you can step back and
forth along these. The explanations sometimes use the concept
of sector lines.